Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (2 page)

The band pressed on. That is what
nomads do. Forward the march. The burden and the bleating.

Switters, however, could not get the
mini-oasis out of his mind. Something about it—its mysterious walls, its lush
vegetation, its auditory hint of young women splashing in the rain—had gripped
his imagination with such steady pressure that eventually he announced to his
hosts his intention to return and investigate the place. One might say they
were shocked, except that his very presence among them was in and of itself so
extraordinary that they were partially immune to further bewilderment.

The khan shook his head, and his
eldest son, who spoke passable English, objected, “Oh, sir, we must not turn
back. The flocks—”

Switters, who spoke passable Arabic,
interrupted to explain that he meant to go alone.

“But, sir,” said the eldest son,
wringing his hands and screwing up his forehead until it looked like the
rolled-back lid of a sardine can, “the horse. We have only these four, you see,
and we—”

“No, no, good buddy. Assure your papa
I had no notion of galloping off with his fine nag. Now, he can let his next
eldest son hop up and take a load off
his
tootsies.”

“But, sir—”

“I’ll just zip on back there in my
starship. If you boys’ll be so good as to ready it for me.”

The khan waved the procession to a
halt. At that exact moment the rain stopped as well. Two of the tribesmen
unfastened Switters’s chair from behind the saddle, unfolded it, placed it on a
reasonably level patch, and set its brake. Then they helped him off the horse
and lifted him gently into the seat. They strapped his croc-skin valise to the
chair back and laid his computer, satellite telephone, and customized Beretta
9-mm pistol, each wrapped in a separate plastic garbage bag, on his lap.

Elaborate farewells were exchanged,
after which the nomads watched for many minutes in nothing short of awe as
Switters, laboriously, precariously—but singing all the while—maneuvered the
rickety, hand-operated wheelchair over the brutal rocks and ensnaring sands of
a landscape so harsh in its promise that a mere glimpse of it would propel a
Romantic poet to therapy or a developer to gin.

Slowly, he dissolved into the
wilderness.

He seemed to be singing “Send in the
Clowns.”

Vatican City
May 1999

The cardinal ordered Switters and
his party to queue up single file. The garden path was narrow, he explained,
and besides, it would be unseemly to approach His Holiness all in a bunch.
Switters was to go first. If his weapon had not been confiscated at the last
security checkpoint, he might have insisted on bringing up the rear, but now it
didn’t matter.

Because of his “disability,” Switters
needn’t feel obliged to kneel upon reaching the throne, the cardinal had
generously conceded. Switters wondered if, nevertheless, he would be expected
to kiss the pope’s ring.
Only way I’m smooching that ring,
he thought,
is
if they paste a crumb of hashish on it, or else smear it with pussy juice or
red-eye gravy.

As he thought that, he was
remembering an actress he used to know, who, in order to entice a tiny trained
terrier to follow her around during a movie scene, had had to have scraps of
raw calf’s liver stapled to the soles of her high-heeled shoes.

Thinking of that terrier magnetized
by meat-baited slippers reminded him then of the old bald parrot that had
waddled after its mistress in a
Lima
suburb many months before—and for a moment Switters
was back in
Peru
. That’s the way the mind works.

That’s the way the mind works: the human
brain is genetically disposed toward organization, yet if not tightly
controlled, will link one imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest of
pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic
pleasure in creative association, without regard for logic or chronological
sequence.

Now, it appears that this prose
account has unintentionally begun in partial mimicry of the mind. Four scenes
have occurred at four different locations at four separate times, some set
apart by months or years. And while they do maintain chronological order and a
connective element (Switters), and while the motif is a far cry from the kind
of stream-of-consciousness technique that makes
Finnegans Wake
simultaneously the most realistic and the most unreadable book ever written
(unreadable precisely
because
it is so realistic), still, alas, the
preceding is probably not the way in which an effective narrative ought
properly to unfold—not even in these days when the world is showing signs of
awakening from its linear trance, its dangerously restrictive sense of itself
as a historical vehicle chugging down a one-way street toward some preordained
apocalyptic goal.

Henceforth, this account shall gather
itself at an acceptable starting point (every beginning in narration is
somewhat arbitrary and the one that follows is no exception), from which it
shall then move forward in a so-called timely fashion, shunning the wantonly
tangential influence of the natural mind and stopping only occasionally to smell
the adjectives or kick some ass.

Since this new approach should render
chapter headings (those that designate date and place) unnecessary, they will
from now on be scratched. If the next chapter
were
to have a heading,
however, it would read:

Seattle
October 1997

It was on a mist-bearded Saturday
morning, gray as a ghoul and cool as clam aspic, that Switters showed up at his
grandmother’s house. En route from the airport, he had stopped by Pike Place
Market, where he bought a bouquet of golden chrysanthemums, as well as a
medium-sized pumpkin. Now, he was forced to juggle those items in order to free
a hand with which to turn up his trench coat collar against the microdontic
nipping of the drizzle. He had also purchased a capsule of XTC from a hipster
fish merchant he knew, and as he walked from the rental car to the stately
mansion, he managed to get it to his mouth and swallow it without benefit of
liquid. It tasted like snapper.

He punched the bell. After a brief
interval, his grandmother’s voice crackled out of the speaker. “Who is it? What
do you want? This had better be good.” The woman refused to keep a downstairs
maid, although she was eighty-three years old and had the wherewithal.

“It’s me. Switters.”

“Who?”

“Switters. Your favorite relation.
Buzz me in, Maestra.”

“Heh! ‘Favorite relation’ in your
dreams, maybe. Do you come bearing gifts?”

“Absolutely.”

He heard the electronic loosening of
the latch. “I’m advancing. Brace yourself, Maestra.”

“Heh!”

When Switters was less than a year
old, his grandmother had stood before his highchair, her hands on her still
glamorous hips. “You’re starting to jabber like a damn disk jockey,” she said.
“Pretty soon you’ll be having a name for me, so I want to make this clear: you
are not to insult me with one of those déclassé G words, like granny or grams
or gramma or whatever, you understand; and if you
ever
call me nannie or
nana or nonna—or moomaw or big mama or mawmaw—I’ll bust your cute little chops.
I’m aware that it’s innate in the human infant to produce M sounds followed by
soft vowels in response to maternalistic stimuli, so if you find it primally
necessary to label me with something of that ilk, then let it be ‘
maestra
.’
Maestra. Okay? That’s the feminine form of the Italian word for ‘master’ or
‘teacher.’ I don’t know if I’ll ever teach you anything worthwhile, and I sure
as hell don’t want to be anybody’s master, but at least maestra has got some
dignity. Try saying it.”

Little more than a year later, when
he was two, the child had marched up to his grandmother, pinned her with his
already fierce, hypnotic green eyes, planted his hands on his hips, and
commanded, “Call me Switters.” Maestra had studied him for a while, had puzzled
over his sudden identification with his none too illustrious surname, and
finally nodded. “Very well,” she said. “Fair enough.”

His mother continued to call him Baby
Dumpling. But not for long.

Maestra failed to greet him in the
vestibule, so Switters wandered the ground floor searching for her. Nearly a
year had passed since he’d been in the house, but it was as he remembered it:
spare, elegant, and spotless (Maestra had a professional housecleaning service
come in twice a week; her meals she ordered delivered from Chinese and pizza
take-out joints), and a dramatic contrast to the dumps in which her
offspring—and
their
offspring—had often resided. Maestra had done all
right for herself. Above the living room fireplace was an Henri Matisse oil of
a mountainous blue nude reclining, distorted limbs akimbo, on a jazzy patterned
harem sofa. He was reasonably sure it was authentic.

He found her in the library, perched
at a computer. Much of the library was jammed with electronic equipment, twice
the amount as on his last visit. Her collection of great books was now double-and triple-parked at one end of the room, while at the other end there were two
computers, an array of modems, printers, and telephones, a forty-inch
television set into which a stack of black boxes was jacked, a fax machine, and
a helmet with goggles attached, which Switters took to be some type of virtual
reality device.

“Maestra! Surfing so early in the
day?”

“Less traffic this time of morning.
Switters! Are you alone?”

“Of course. Who’d I dare bring with
me?”

Punching off-line, she swiveled to
face him. “Well, I did intercept an e-mail message in which you promised little
Suzy you were gonna take her ‘all the way to grandma’s house.’ “ Her
affectionate gaze hardened into a glare.

Switters blushed so incandescently he
could have hired out his face as a beer sign. It was one of those instances,
rare in his life, when he was at a loss for words.

“Perhaps that expression has some
different connotation for you. Eh? Something I’m not hip to?” Her smile was
ironic and a tad malicious. “After all, you’ve always exhibited the good taste
not to refer to
me
as ‘grandma.’ “

“Uh, er,” Switters stammered, “Suzy?
Suzy’s in
Sacramento
, how in hell did you access her e-mail?”

“Heh! Easy as pie. Child’s play. You
of all people ought to know that.” The edges of her smile softened some. “All
right, Switters. Come here. Kiss these wrinkly old cheeks. It’s a blessing to
see you. A mixed blessing, but a blessing, nonetheless. Mmm. Boy. So what’d you
bring me? Great, you know I’m crazy about mums. And a most fine pumpkin. Yes.
Excellent damn pumpkin.” Her disappointment in the presents was ill concealed.

From his jacket pocket, he fished a
Bakelite bracelet, pinkish butterscotch in tone. “Found this in an antique shop
in
Paris
. Guy claimed it belonged to Josephine Baker.”

“Well, it’s mine now!” Maestra was
immoderately fond of bracelets, often wearing as many as ten on each thin arm.
“That’s so thoughtful of you, Switters. So sweet.” She paused, adding the
bracelet to her jumble and admiring it there. “But don’t think this lets you
off the hook, buddy boy. I don’t have to tell you what a wicked degenerate you
are.”

“Oh, tell me anyway. I never tire of
hearing it. Puts a spring in my step.”

“You
are
a wicked degenerate.
A rascal, a wastrel, a pervert. . . . Don’t look so pleased with yourself. This
business with little Suzy is not funny. It’s sick. What’s more, it’s criminally
prosecutable. You’ve always been the most irresponsible—”

“Now, now. How can you say that? I’m
a dedicated, decorated public servant with a top-secret security clearance.
Hardly the resumé of a slacker.”

“I’m supposed to sleep better nights
knowing the likes of you is guarding the henhouse? It amazes me you’ve lasted
in that job.”

“Over a decade now.”

“It amazes me they ever recruited you
in the first place.”

“It was my firm jaw and air of tragic
nobility.”

“It was your academic record.” There
was an irrepressible yeast of pride in her voice when she said, “The dean of
students at
Berkeley
told me personally they’d never seen the likes of you
when it came to cybernetics and linguistics. . . .”

“Don’t forget modern poetry. I had
nine hours of modern poetry.”

“He neglected to mention that. And
the rugby fellow, that swarthy Englishman, he said you were the only American
he’d ever coached who actually understood the game.”

“Nigel was just buttering you up. He
was consumed with desire for you. You drove him wild.”

“Heh! Rubbish. I was a senior citizen
even then.
Rugby
’s barbaric. Worse than football. But there’s no
denying it, you hit the grade-point jackpot.”